Refugees and the Crisis of Europe

by Mayanthi Fernando and Cristiana Giordano

Since the beginning of 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries—many of them fleeing war, persecution, and unrelenting poverty—have been crossing borders into and within Europe, traversing the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the English Channel. This so-called crisis has turned immigration, asylum, border control, and state sovereignty into interconnected problems, making migration not only a political event but also a media spectacle. Contributors to this Hot Spots series map the histories, geopolitics, ethical imaginaries, forms of sovereignty, and patterns of circulation that state categories of crisis and emergency render visible and/or invisible, in Europe and elsewhere. Each essay is accompanied by an image from End of Dreams, an installation and photo project by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen.